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Would Mad Men's Don Draper Have A Place In Online Advertising?

Since the dawn of online advertising in the mid-1990s, ad agency “creatives,” the Mad Men types who come up with all those TV ads we love and hate to watch, have chafed at the limitations of the Web as an ad medium. From the banner and search ads to pre-roll video spots and social ads, online ad formats seem to offer little of the creative palette that television offered in the golden age of traditional advertising.

Now, as more big brands, not just direct marketers, try to engage with audiences online in a bigger way, there’s a concerted effort to overcome those limitations. Today that effort was front and center at OMMA Display, a conference in Los Angeles held by the online advertising and media site MediaPost. Eric Weisberg, executive creative director at ad agency JWT, spoke with longtime ad critic Barbara Lippert, a columnist with MediaPost, spoke about how to inject more creativity into online ad campaigns. Here’s what they had to say:

Lippert says the key issue today is whether there’s a role for the “big idea” types of ads online. Weisberg thinks so. We’re witnessing a creative awakening online, he says. There was a lot of focus on targeting. Now there’s a realization that creativity can have a role.

We had to break down the established organizational rules, Weisberg says. Bringing analytics and production people to the creative table is where the creative awakening is happening.

Is there a place online to tell the big stories online that you can do on TV now? Bigtime, says Weisberg. There’s an emphasis now for making content king online. Online is the “first screen” now, not TV or other media. When you do that, you’re creating content that’s unique to that screen, and then you try to magnify that with other media. For instance, JWT did a campaign for Listerine with College Humor that involved people eating awful-smelling stuff and seeing if Listerine kills the resulting bad breath.

How do you see display evolving? As an example, Weisberg shows JWT’s Cannes Gold Lion award-winning campaign for Band-Aid that lets kids snap a photo of their Muppet-branded bandages with a smartphone, which then sends them (thanks to QR codes on the bandage) to an app where the Muppets appear and do funny things. He views the app as an ongoing platform for the brand–a chance to turn 4 million bandages into 4 million free media impressions. It’s turning that moment of hurt into a moment of delight.

How do you move from a couple of great ideas to getting skeptical agency executives to do this throughout the company? Peter Minnium, head of digital brand initiatives for the trade group Interactive Advertising Bureau, asks from the audience. Weisberg says the account people are part of the creative process, so it’s not a matter of selling them on an idea.

How are you looking at Facebook given GM’s ad pullout? Lippert asks. Weisberg says brands can get great engagement on Facebook. We’ll see how their ads develop, but they have one of the most incredible targeting engines on the Internet. Starbucks, Oreo, many others do a great job of engaging on Facebook.

How did you measure success on those campaigns, and how did you separate success on mobile vs. other channels the campaign used? Weisberg: Retailers who didn’t want to bother carrying the Muppets brand then were calling Band-Aid once the ads and apps started running.

How are you trying to change display ads on mobile, which don’t work very well? Weisberg: We’re seeing a lot of success putting more thought on the overall experience rather than just the ad unit. You want to be the content you want them to do, not interrupt what they’re doing. You have to start in a different place. The media and the PR people are coming to the creative table too.

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